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Researchers

David J. Deming

Economist, Harvard University; Danoff Dean of Harvard College
Signed the letter · Academia · United States

homepage · wikipedia

Danoff Dean of Harvard College and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he served as academic dean from 2021 to 2024. Research on education, skills, technology, and the labor market, including 'The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI' (Management Science, 2026), 'Four Facts about Human Capital' (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2022), and 'Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Team Performance' (Econometrica, 2021). Co-director of Harvard's Project on Workforce. Recipient of the Sherwin Rosen Prize (2022) and the David N. Kershaw Award (2018). PhD in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School. Signed the wemustactnow.ai open letter.

AI-written Documented facts only, from the sources below.

19 works in the co-authorship map · 4,700 citations across them

Sources

  1. David Deming - Harvard Kennedy School
  2. David Deming (economist) - Wikipedia
  3. The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI
  4. Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Team Performance
  5. “Signed the wemustactnow.ai open letter” — source

In the network

14 co-authors on the map · PageRank #12 of 400 · bridge #10 of 400 · 1 step from Erik Brynjolfsson · cluster: Labor markets and technology.

Measured on this map only, which grows out of the letter's signatories; what these numbers mean. See David J. Deming on the map

Documented positions

Will AI actually boost productivity and growth? leans agree

A controlled experiment finds that working with AI improves task performance, most for lower-ability participants.

Evidence

  1. “AI improves performance more for people with low baseline ability.” — source

Why researchers disagree on this · Who else says what

Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates? unknown

No documented evidence reviewed yet.

Will AI widen inequality? it's complicated

An experiment finds AI narrows performance gaps between workers, while survey work documents large cross-country gaps in AI adoption.

Evidence

  1. “eliminating miscalibration would cause AI to reduce performance inequality nearly twice as much as it already does” — source
  2. “document large gaps in AI adoption, both between the US and Europe and across European countries” — source

Why researchers disagree on this · Who else says what

Should governments act on AI now? unknown

No documented evidence reviewed yet.

How fast will the impact arrive? unknown

No documented evidence reviewed yet.

Selected work

Writes with

Ben Weidmann (4), Adam Blandin (3), Alexander Bick (3), Claudia Goldin (3), Lawrence Katz (3), Andrew Caplin (2), Daniel Martin (2), Noam Yuchtman (2), Philip Marx (2), David Autor (1), Erik Brynjolfsson (1), Esteban Moro (1)

Co-authors on the map, by papers written together (12 of 14 shown).

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